Armed and Dangerous: A Writer's Guide to Weapons

Howdunit Series

by Michael Newton

Talk about murder! Inaccurate information about weapons can kill your story before a potential publisher has even finished reading your manuscript. Today’s readers of mysteries, thrillers, Westerns, true crime, police procedurals, and romantic suspense are better informed about weapons than ever before. If you think you can slip one past these readers, you’re wrong. Dead wrong. You don’t have to be a gun buff to need this book. If you care enough about your readers and your craft to strive for accuracy, then this book is your comprehensive source for information on:

• The characteristics, advantages, and disadvantages of hundreds of weapons
• Which weapons were available during each period of history, including their wars
• Weapons favored by various types of criminals and terrorists
• Weapons used by law enforcement
• Weapons used for hunting

You’ll also find a glossary of weapon-related terms and a series of appendices including:

• A selective chronology of firearms development
• Comparative handgun identification information
• Comparative trajectories of rifle cartridges

In the past, this kind of information was attainable only through hours of digging. Now it’s available at your fingertips in one handy guide.

Make sure your story is accurate—refer to Armed & Dangerous.

Genres: Writing, Nonfiction, Reference, Research, True Crime

186 pages, Paperback

First published July 8, 1990

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

From Wikipedia:
"Michael Newton (born 1951) is an American author best known for his work on Don Pendleton's Mack Bolan series. Newton first began work on the Executioner series by co-writing "The Executioner's War Book" with Don Pendleton in 1977. Since then he has been a steady writer for the series with almost 90 entries to his credit, which triples the amount written by creator Don Pendleton. His skills and knowledge of the series have allowed him to be picked by the publishers to write the milestone novels such as #100, #200, and #300.

Writing under the pseudonym Lyle Brandt, Michael Newton has also become a popular writer of Western novels. He has written a number of successful non-fiction titles as well, including a book on genre writing (How to Write Action Adventure Novels). His book Invisible Empire: The Ku Klux Klan in Florida won the Florida Historical Society's 2002 Rembert Patrick Award for Best Book in Florida History. Newton's "Encyclopedia of Cryptozoology" won the American Library Association's award for Outstanding Reference Work in 2006."

Pen names: Lyle Brandt, Don Pendleton, Jack Buchanan

Bibiliography available here.

Reviews

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nothing can blow an author's credibility in the reader's eyes like anachronistic or inaccurate information in a story, and a lot of readers of crime fiction know their guns - I remember reading a novel and being jolted right out of the story and back into my living room when the author had a character load a "clip" into a revolver. I almost put the book down without finishing the story.
If you write fiction involving the use of weapons, it's important to know how to describe them and their workings, and if you don't have that knowledge from personal experience, this book or another like it is a needed tool in your toolbox.

[Jay Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a "must buy" for any writer who includes any weapons in their stories. It gives you enough info to sound like you know what you are writing. Only problem with it was that I carried and read it on an airplane and got a number of wary stares. Worth it though.

[Lindsey Duncan · Rating 1 out of 5]

What I expected from this book was a solid guide to how various guns work, enabling the novice to describe their use in fiction. What I got from this book might have been what I expected, but it was buried under historical data and numbers. The bulk of the text is a historical accounting of each gun as it develops, with weight, caliber, firing power, etc. This made it almost impossible to follow the essence of the information: when was this innovation developed? How did it change combat? The best chapter is the one on explosives, because it diverges from the stats into a broader discussion of how such devices might be improvised.

This book would have been much better served to have a large appendix with all the statistics and simply refer to the guns' salient points as each was introduced. I did pick up a few small points from reading it, but not what I hoped.

[Aaron Jura · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fairly good reference book on weapons for writers. I didn’t find that it had much of the information I was looking for, but for writers who are also novices with firearms this would be a good primer and reference book.

[E. Kahn · Rating 2 out of 5]

For a guy who makes such a big deal about technical accuracy when writing about firearms in fiction, the author sure makes a lot of blunders writing about firearms in nonfiction.

Taking just the WW1 section, he completely neglects notable arms like the infamous Canadian Ross rifle, the P14 and M1917 Enfields, the French Ruby pistol, etc. in favor of oddities like the Webley Automatic Revolver. Moreover, the info he does present is prejudiced and outdated; a curious writer wo wanted to inform themselves o the topic would do much better reading a few threads on a collectors' forums than on this hastily written volume.

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mike Newton offers a thorough guide to weapons from time periods and geographic places like the American Old West, World War II, and modern-day US cities. He also offers insightful information on basic firearms forensics and other useful tips for writers dealing with genres ranging from espionage thrillers to police procedurals.

Though a tad dry in some places, Newton manages to maintain a sense of wit throughout most of the book. A helpful guide for any fiction writer.

[Jennifer Worrell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Looks like a pretty extensive guide, only the title is misleading. It's all about firearms, so if you're looking for other weaponry you're out of luck. However, it's interesting to know that according to this, the "silencer" is BS; should be "suppressor", and the sound is not dulled all that much.

[Laura Baugh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Serious misnomer -- this book is actually about firearms, not the broad category of "weapons." If the title had been more specific, I would have rated it higher; it's a good resource for those who aren't that familiar with firearms as a subject.

[Kristen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great book for all aspiring writers to learn about weapons, mainly guns, to use for their characters. A great reference book.

[Fredrick Danysh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Many writers are not familiar with or have firsthand experience with the various types of weapons they refer to in the stories. This is a good basic guide.

[T.M. Carper · Rating 1 out of 5]

Very outdated. Good if you're using older weapons in your fiction, but not helpful for me.